Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Werewolves have come
to London, and subtly put their plans in motion. Their actions lost and
mistaken for a rampant increase in serial killing and a new deadly plague
taxing the resources of the city.

As people react to
the growing panic, the growing demand on emergency services - very few people
guess the truth and several people find themselves on the front line of the
upcoming war.

This book is a
dystopian development story, as we begin the eve of an apocalypse - this time
with werewolves rather than the more traditional zombies.

Which is a grossly
simplistic way to sum up this book. Like many of the good dystopians, this is
less about the specific creatures in question or even their evil so much as it
is a study of how society and people react to the slow collapse

Here we see a lot of
insights into growing fear, panic, vigilantism and prejudice as immigrant
groups in particular are scapegoated as is all too often common

One of the more unusual
elements of this book is the very large number of characters, most of whom
aren’t connected to each other in any real way (unless you count “living in
London” which is a pretty nebulous definition of connection given the size of
this city) but each of which have very different experiences, opinions and
viewpoints to the creeping disaster caused by the explosion of werewolf numbers

This also includes a
number of werewolf characters or characters who become werewolves, adding a
level of nuance to the big dangerous threat far more so than you’d get from,
say, zombies

It is interesting to
see such a wide range of characters each adapting to the horrors of the growing
werewolf encroachment, each of them reacting differently. My favourite and
chosen protagonist is Liz the policewoman who is determined to hold this
together, despite her criminally inclined father encroaching on her life and
her sudden adoption of a Romanian child. I like her and I’d love to follow her
story above all. There’s the reclusive agoraphobic woman, the father with
Alzheimer's she cares for and her sister - who uses sex to steal from wealthy
man while loving the thrill and risk of the whole thing (she’s also a character
I’d kind of love to see despite not loving her storyline so far). The Sikh boy
who forms an unlikely alliance with the boy bullying him as well as trying to
protect his sister along with upholding and thinking on Sikh values (perhaps a
little much for a young teen). The deeply religious Catholic gay teenager
facing a desperate moral and ethical battle over his sinfulness of being gay
and a murdering cannibal (and these being put kind of together is not… ideal,
even if the storyline and his relationship to a gay Black werewolf contains
more levels than this). A computer nerd who becomes an obsessive survivalist as
he’s the only one who sees the way it’s going. A biker gang. A woman who may be
a sociopath and her university professor. A Carribean nurse full of amazing
compassion…

This means this book
has a lot of diversity and representation, especially since nearly all of these
characters have storylines of their own, which I definitely applaud. Especially
since so many of these characters are so very compelling and with very
interesting storylines

My issue with this book
is it’s really really really long. Or it feels really really long. I’m not sure
if it’s a bad issue, exactly, because none of this book is bad or boring or a
problem. But, I’m reminded very much of early seasons of The Strain or Fear
the Walking Dead - where you know where the story is going, you know we’re
heading to the werewolf dystopia. Everything screams that dystopia is coming
and by half way through the book I was kind of ready for the preamble to be
over and for us to move on.

And on all those characters?
Again. It’s long. It’s long - or feels long - because the dystopia doesn’t
develop slowly but because we’re seeing each day through many many many lenses
which does slow it down.

And, again, I’m torn here. I can’t say I want rid of any of these lenses. I
liked these lenses a lot. I can’t point to any and say “hey, we don’t need
this” (or, rather, I can say that we don’t NEED any of them - only some of
them) or “I don’t want this” because I pretty much did (except maybe the biker
gang). So I have a weird conflict between both loving what is here, but also
wishing it moved faster but not knowing how to do it without losing something I
really valued.

Despite all these
many point of views… I’m still not sure I buy it. Yes, these people are spreading
werewolfness unbenownst to the general public and running amok on a night - but
I find it unlikely that as little epidemiology happened with the “survivors” of
werewolf bites as did - or that far far more werewolves running amok in the
night weren’t killed by modern weaponry. We’re told how werewolves are
multiplying and we see more and more werewolves appear and the stories of those
werewolves. But it all seems to hinge on the authorities being… rather blase
and absent? I mean this is a plague, a serial killer and werewolves charging
around London and this is the extent of the response? This isn’t some city in
the north. Leeds could fall into a volcano and it’s unlikely anyone in
government would notice *waves bitter northerner flag*.

I do like this book
and wonder where it will go from here - especially the shades coming in from
werewolf attitudes (some of these werewolves, I simply cannot see being all
gung ho for genocide or taking over the world etc) which is going to add new
layers of complexity for future books, raising the potential of resistances,
werewolf factions and Liz being supremely awesome. All of these characters have
wonderful potential for the future now the world is definitely moving towards
the dystopia and as some of these characters are beginning to team up. I am
intrigued. I am hooked. I am interested. I am intrigued. But I also want the
excellent character stories to be backed with some movement in the world as
well.